Is CableCARD a dud? Only 2,000 requested over summer

CableCARDs have been as popular as a sunburn this summer as adoption continues …

It's easy to underestimate the sheer unattractiveness of CableCARDs and the one-way-only devices that have so far accepted them. I mean, 594 consumer electronics items have CableCARD slots, the entire cable industry has been forced to support the scheme for years, and the 2007 "integration ban" was designed to make third-party products just as compelling as non-CableCARD set-top boxes offered by the cable companies. Surely someone must be buying CableCARD-ready TVs?

And yet, in the last three months, only 2,000 CableCARDs have been requested by customers—a number that covers the entire US. When the top ten cable operators are lumped together, they've only provided 374,000 CableCARDs in the entire history of the program.

To say that these numbers are "uninspiring" is an insult to "uninspiring." Perhaps a better comment would be, in reference to the entire program, that you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a... ah, nevermind. Another folksy metaphor ruined.

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association issued its occasional report to the FCC today on CableCARD deployments, and it's more evident than ever that the program hasn't worked. Initially designed to break the cable industry's stranglehold on programming navigation devices (think set-top boxes), the initiative has found little consumer uptake.

Much of that is due to the limitations of host devices, which until this year have not generally supported two-way operation and therefore could not support electronic program guides, video on demand, and pay-per-view features. Most cable users simply went with the cable company box, which featured two-way operation and needed no CableCARD.

After the integration ban went into effect last summer, however, CableCARD usage exploded in one particular sector: the set-top box market. Now that cable operators had to use the same technology everyone else was using, third-party devices should have looked more attractive, but buyers don't seem to care. The low number of CableCARDs issued has us wondering how well TiVo's HD DVRs are selling in the US.

Though only 374,000 CableCARDs have been issued to customers, set-top boxes sent out from cable companies with CableCARDs already loaded have been flying off the (central office) shelves. More than 7.8 million such boxes have been deployed since last summer. As the NCTA notes, "in less than 15 months, cable operators have deployed more than twenty times as many CableCARD-enabled devices than the total number of CableCARDs requested by customers" in the last four years.

With tru2way just around the corner, we'll have a chance to see how the same basic idea can work when devices have real two-way access to the cable company systems. Physical CableCARDs are still required for security, so the costly FCC-mandated program may turn out to have real value at last.